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Until recently, IT departments thought that all they needed to do was to provide a self-service portal to app dev to provision VMs with Linux or Windows, and they would have a private cloud that was comparable to the public cloud.

Today, in order for IT to become a cloud service provider, IT must not only embrace the public cloud in a service broker model, IT needs to provide a broader range of cloud services. This 5 minute webinar, describes the future IT operating model as IT departments transform into cloud service providers.

Many IT organizations started their cloud journey by creating a new, separate cloud team to implement a Greenfield, private cloud. Automation and proactive monitoring using a Cloud Management Platform was key to the success for their private cloud. By utilizing VMWare’s vRealize Cloud Management Platform, IT could easily expand into the hybrid cloud, provisioning workloads to vCloud Air or other public clouds from a single interface. Effectively, creating “one cloud” for the business to consume and “one cloud” for IT to manage.

However, the folks managing the brownfield weren’t staying still. They too wanted to improve the service they were providing the business and they too wanted to become more efficient. So they also invested in automation. Without a coherent strategy, both Brownfield and Greenfield took their own separate forks down the automation path, confusing the business on which services they should be consuming. We started this journey by creating a separate cloud team. However, it may be time to re-think the boundaries of the private cloud and bring Greenfield and Brownfield together to provide consistency in the way we approach automation.

In order to be immediately productive, the app dev teams are looking for more than infrastructure-as-a-service. They want platform-as-a-service. These might be second generation platforms such as database-as-a-service (Oracle, MSSQL, MySQL, etc.) or middleware-as-a-service (such as Web Methods). Or they need third generation platforms based on unstructured PaaS like containers or structured PaaS like cloud foundry. The terms first, second and third generation map to the mainframe (1st generation), distributed computing (2nd generation), and cloud native applications (the 3rd generation).

Multiple cloud services can be bundled together to create environment-as-a-service. For example, LAMP-stacks – Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (or Python). These multi-VM application blueprints lets entire environments be provisioned at a click of a button.

A lot of emphasis has been placed on accessing these cloud services through a self-service portal. However, DevOps best practices is moving towards infrastructure as code. In order to support developer-defined infrastructure, IT organizations must also provide an API to their cloud. Infrastructure-as-code lets you version the infrastructure scripts with the application source code together, ultimately enabling the same deployment process in every environment (dev, test, stage and prod) – improving deployment success rate.

Many companies are piloting DevOps with one or two application pipelines. However, in order to scale, DevOps best practices must be shared across multiple app dev teams. App dev teams are typically not familiar with architecting infrastructure or the tools that automate infrastructure provisioning. Hence, a DevOps enablement team is useful for educating the app dev teams on DevOps best practices and providing the DevOps automation expertise. This team can also provide feedback to the cloud team on where to expand cloud services.

This IT operating model addresses Gartner’s bimodal IT approach. Mode 1 is traditional, sequential and used for systems of record. Mode 2 is agile, non-linear, and used for systems of engagement. Mode 1 is characterized by long cycle times measured in months whereas mode 2 has shorter cycle times measured in days and weeks.

It is important to note that the business needs both modes to exist. It’s not one or the other. Just like how the business needs both interfaces to the cloud: self-service portal and API.

What does this mean to you? IT leaders must be able to articulate a clear picture of the future-state that encompasses both mode 1 and mode 2, that leverages both a self-service portal and API to the organization’s cloud services. IT leaders need a roadmap to transform their organization into cloud service providers that traverse the hybrid cloud. The biggest challenge to the transformation is changing people (the way they think, the culture) and processes (the way they work). VMware can not only help you with the technology; VMware’s AccelerateTM Advisory Services can help you address the people and process transformation.

Reg Lo is the Director of VMware Accelerate Advisory Services and is based in San Diego, CA. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.

About this Blog

VMware Accelerate Advisory Services provide high-value enterprise IT strategy consulting to help CIOs and their key stakeholders accelerate IT and business transformation, and deepen their understanding of the business value proposition associated with cloud computing. Services cover all phases of the enterprise IT strategy development process, from benchmark analysis and value modeling to balanced transformation plans.